As one of the most successful video game properties to make the transition; Mortal Kombat has been destined to make a return to the big screen for two decades!

During that time there have been many false starts, somethign writer Oren Uziel can attest. As a collaborator on Kevin Tancharoen's ill fated Mortal Kombat movie reboot, Uziel was one of the men responsible for unleashing Mortal Kombat: Rebirth onto the world.

In an interview with Collider, the writer has discussed his involvement with the notorious 2010 short, which in turn inspired Machinima to commision the live-action webseries Mortal Kombat: Legacy.

Uziel was recruited off the back of his work on upcoming Netflix series Shimmer Lake, but the Mortal Kombat job was short lived. The writer explained, "... the guy who hired me exited the company before we even completed the paperwork. So it was like a job that existed and then disappeared, it was soul-crushing." He did not return for Legacy, but was brought back as interest in the film renewed.

... then after a couple years of [Legacy] New Line came onboard to actually make a feature version again. And it was at that point that Kevin called and New Line called and said, ‘Hey, you were there at at the beginning, do you wanna come back?’ I said, ‘Sure’, so I wrote them a feature that has been the basis of what the Mortal Kombat movie will be, but it’s been kicking around for a little while now. I know James Wan came on to produce, so that to me was a good sign that maybe things were heating up again, but beyond that I really don’t know the specifics.

Aquaman director James Wan became associated with the film reboot in August, 2015 [full story], with Simon McQuoid attached to direct the feature as of last November. Commenting on the project at last year's Television Critics Association awards, Wan noted the need to "do it right".

Despite its considerable success as a YouTube series, Legacy and the works of Tancharoen raised concerns about the handling of the Mortal Kombat mythology. In 2012, Uziel's script was rumored to centre around the journey of Liu Kang from supermarket employee to destined. Uziel summarized his draft in the Collider interview.

“Well, and again I don’t know what remains of this, but I know that it was going to be—it’s almost like if you took The Avengers, or if you took a storyline like that and set it in a sort of hard-R, over-the-top violence and hard-edged world of Mortal Kombat. It was a little bit like that, it was a little bit like a Wanted-type story that brought together a bunch of these characters and just pulled zero punches, and had a tone that was still fun but very dark.”

The promise of hard violence will tickle fans of the series' famed fatalities, but could raise alarm bells for those looking for a faithful adaptation. Something star of the original film, Christophe Lambert did, when he talked about the reboot [full story].

Hopefully the violence isn't gratuitous. My fear is that the line between gritty and dark and just plain silly isn't as plain when the writer's priority is an R rating. Even after all these years (decades!), I just wanna see the original story told well.

I'm hoping to see the movie start off with a prologue of Goro vs The Great Kung Lao and that fight ending and a jump forward to the present tournament and it would be neat to do like Enter the Dragon did at the beginning as well. Where each fighter is thinking about what brought them to Tsung's boat and we have their flashback thoughts. I also want to see the "real" story played out in the new movie too. During the tournament Scorpion killed Sub-Zero, and not Liu Kang so in the reboot hopefully we'll get that right. Looking at the beginning of the official MKII comic where we see Kano, Sonya and Cage fending off Goro during Liu's final battle it would be nice to see that as well. It is okay to add a little twist but the original movie I thought, even though an awesome film, strayed a little too far from the original story. There should also be some extra fights between the fighters from the game and those lesser fighters that didn't make it to the end. Like many fans, I too have wrote a script. :)